The gaming industry is the highest paid in the entertainment industry today. It has managed to surpass even film and music production, and the reasons for this are numerous - from economic to social and cultural.
The largest video game companies in the world - Sony, Microsoft, Tencent, Nintendo, Activision Blizzard, Ubisoft - generate revenues of several billion dollars every year.
The leading countries in terms of income from the gaming industry include the USA and China with 46 and 44 billion dollars a year. It is followed by Japan with 19, South Korea with seven and Germany with six billion.
Last year, gaming made a global income of about 230 billion dollars, and estimates are that, according to the media, it will exceed 2030 billion by 300. It is also expected that the number of players will increase from year to year and increase from the current 3,4 to 3,8 billion.
People from various professions enter the gaming industry - from cooks to philologists to dentists. And it often happens that they come from different parts of the world because of the desire to learn and improve, but also because of salaries that are incomparably higher than average.
"Gaming is highly profitable, but also highly risky. A number of attempts are made in the hope that one of them will succeed. An example is Angry Birds, which made over 40 video games, but only 2021 were successful," explains Nikola Mitić, general manager at Playstudios Europe - a video game company that was originally founded in Las Vegas and has been operating in Belgrade since XNUMX.
How do games make money?
In this dynamic industry where employees are quickly leaving their positions due to its dynamic development and unpredictability, the real confusion is how games make money, if most of them can be played for free on mobile phones.
Mitić explains that in 2008, when games appeared on mobile phones, there was a subscription model Premium. It involved paying for games in advance, which is true for most PC and console games. Some of those games were Angry Birds, Doodle Jump, Cut The Rope.
The concept of free games or Free to play started in 2012. Although industry workers became skeptical about how they would make money, the concept led to even more popularization of gaming. The games exploded. The magic word free it led to millions of circulations.
"Only 2,5 percent of people spend money on video games and they keep the whole economy going." But some payers are able to spend over 10.000 euros per month on video games," explains Mitić.
Another way to monetize free games is through advertisements, some of which require a subscription. This new model is known as Subscription. The concept is similar to that of Netflix: the user pays a monthly subscription and watches whatever movie he wants, or plays whatever game he wants from the Google or Apple portfolio.
Something more than a typical video game is the so-called E-sports that have reached a new dimension. These are games in live arenas in which a large number of professional players participate and earn hundreds of millions of dollars. Their earnings come from streaming, from sponsors, because, as in any sport, the competing teams have sponsorships.
In 2020, Esports generated over $947 million in revenue, and it is projected to exceed $2025 billion by XNUMX.
Photo: WikipediaMalaysia Esports Carnival 2019
Photo: Wikipedia
In a similar way, through sponsorship, players on streaming platforms who play games and record themselves while doing so earn money. The question that arises is: why would anyone watch someone else play video games when they can play them themselves? What is specific about it? From a social point of view, the connection between the player and the people who watch him as he passes the levels is important and thus get the impression that the player is addressing them personally. From an economic point of view, of course, there is the profit, which is already predicted to be in the billions.
Gaming industry in Serbia
With over 2,5 thousand people, the gaming industry in Serbia is becoming one of the most promising areas that generates a profit of 125 million euros per year. The growth of the branch is increasing by 11 percent from year to year. Big companies that have come to our market are responsible for all of that.
"When talking about the gaming industry in Serbia, usually everyone says that it is a young industry, since we are quite late with technologies compared to the rest of the world", explains the director of culture and engagement at Playstudios Europe Sanja Žugić, who is also a member of the board board of the Serbian Gaming Association.
In addition to Playstudios, there are about 200 other companies that make video games in Serbia. 72 companies operate in Belgrade, such as Nordeus, O3ONE Games and Qcuantox Technology.
Novi Sad follows with 26 companies, some of which are: Mad Head Games, Recontact Digital Arts, 2nd Studio, Balcony Softworks and Vivify Ideas. Companies in other cities are not so numerous, but they are expected to develop.
In all these companies there is a great demand for new personnel. This year alone, over 330 new positions were opened for game designers, programmers, project managers and people from the world of business and marketing.
Education and gaming
There is no formal education for young people who want to enter the gaming industry.
Žugić says that while she was studying programming, she heard about a gaming company. When she got there, she found only seven people.
"That was fun because I knew absolutely nothing about it." I had no idea where to start when you want to learn how to make a video game. What you need from hardware to software".
Then she realized that programming was still a good decision because it belongs to the fields related to the creative industry and the IT sector that are becoming more and more common in colleges around the world: sound production, digital marketing, digital arts, graphic design. For example, over 40.000 students enrolled in courses related to the IT sector in Serbia this year.
"Educational institutions realized that they did not have the necessary knowledge for development and then along the way they involved the economy and individuals who share their knowledge gained in practice and help them create a curriculum through which they will work with students who will then be able to work in gaming" , explains Žugić.
When it entered the world of the gaming industry, some small groups of people started to learn from each other and develop video games. It grew over time by contacting companies that make video games abroad, going to various events organized by those companies. Then those small teams started doing some small jobs for them, mostly related to design. Ten years later, they started making profits by producing games in Serbia and exporting them abroad.
"As the company grew and the number of people in the industry grew, the knowledge grew," but he says this wasn't the only thing that helped spread knowledge. Game jams and hackathons also contributed. In this way, students and high school students played, spending 48 hours each answering specific topics by creating a video game.
Challenges for companies
The lack of school staff represents one of the biggest challenges for companies, considering that many of them are created on enthusiasm, and not on established school programs.
Playstudios Europe is one of them, and in it you can see examples of people who came from a wide variety of industries, but were united by their love for video games.
"In our company, we have people who came from architecture, and in gaming they do 3D modeling or landscape design." We have people from philology who work as copywriters. But we also have some unrelated branches, like culinary and veterinary, from which people come just because they love and want to learn how to play video games," says Ivan Jovanović, art director at Playstudios Europe.
Another challenge is the lack of people with ten or more years of work experience.
The third challenge, especially in Serbia, is the perception of the gaming industry in public opinion. Even today, when talking about video games, there are often prejudices that are mostly created by the media, which report on gaming only when games "spoil children".
Parents influence their children not to engage in this industry because it is considered unpromising and unprofitable. In addition, video games are most often associated with wasting time in front of a computer or mobile phone. Jargon - by brainwashing.
Integrating video games into popular culture
When asked by the "Vremena" portal when for the first time some music from a video game got a completely separate life, i.e. integrated into popular culture, all four representatives of Playstudios Europe agreed that it was the music from "Super Mario", which was created in 1985 , although at first they hesitated between this game and Tetris.
The ability of the gaming industry to communicate with other branches of art is also one of the reasons, in addition to the mentioned economic ones, why this industry has a bright future.
In the period when the first video games were created, the products of popular culture influenced the creation of new games. Less than ten years after Neil Armstrong landed on the moon, a cult video game was created in Japan Space Invaders – first as an arcade, then a computer game, and today it can be played for free through Google Play and Apple stores.
At the turn of the new millennium, the direction was reversed. It would mostly happen that a video game was first created, such as "Pokémon", which is also one of the most played games on the planet, and then a series was created based on it.
In recent times, such an example is represented by a series The Last Of Us which premiered in January of this year, and was based on the video game of the same name from 2013.
Video game icons such as Lara Croft and Mario have become an example of fashion icons for many precisely because video games have integrated into the fashion industry. Clothing featuring video game characters is for sure must have gaming enthusiast.
Probably the best example that the border between popular culture and video games is more blurred than ever is represented by the aforementioned E-sports, which have long been a global phenomenon with viewership that in some situations is higher than that of traditional sports.
A brief history of video games
The first digital games appeared in 1950 when computers cost hundreds of thousands of dollars.
In the 1970s, consoles appeared - devices that were made specifically for playing games, easy to use, and arcades - games that were played in institutions and public places on the principle of inserting coins or tokens.
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In the 60s, consoles and arcades generated $XNUMX billion in revenue. Then came the decline of consoles, which was conditioned by the quality of the games, and the PC appeared, which took over part of that market. PC games are played on computers with Windows, macOS and Linux operating systems. They are downloaded through various distribution platforms, such as Steam and Origin.
In 1995, Nokia released the first snakes. Thanks to video games on phones, there has been an expansion of video games that have become available from various parts of the world and we can carry them in our pocket.
The largest number of people, about 2,8 billion, play games on mobile phones with the largest number of games from Asia from companies such as Tencent, Sony, miHoYo, Alibaba, Cyber Agent. Then, about 900 million play games via PC, while consoles are the least used of all the mentioned devices, with 630 million users.
One of the most popular consoles in the nineties was the Sega Mega Drive and they were played in rooms called segotheques. These rooms gradually became Soniteka, then gaming rooms, and today they have been reduced to betting shops.
New worlds
Video games provide a sense of community, fantasy and new worlds. That, according to our interlocutors from Playstudios, is perhaps the main reason why they survive so long. Resources are managed, thinking is tactical, and there is the least of what is thought to be the most - violence and weapons.
The possibilities are endless. If you die, you can play again. You have the power to decide whether you will make a moral or an immoral decision. For all this, they conclude, films and series do not leave many possibilities.
